“I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.”  ~John Locke

“Never mistake motion for action.”  ~Ernest Hemingway

“I believe half the unhappiness in life comes from people being afraid to go straight at things.”  ~William J. Lock

“People may doubt what you say, but they will believe what you do.”  ~Lewis Cass

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The noise of this life is deafening and filled with echoes of voices that mean well but do little.

It has long been said “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

I have spent the last several years of my life pursuing God and an understanding of His supernatural Kingdom.  I have devoted hours upon hours and days upon days to study, prayer, learning through podcasts and teaching series.  I have done all of these things along with trying and succeeding but mostly trying and failing to see the kinds of results in healing and bringing freedom that Jesus Himself saw.

And all the while I have found myself consistently bombarded by external forces and voices who are a mere echo of their leaders’ voice…those who have had little to no actual experiences in demonstrating the King and His Kingdom—and yet still these critics have always seemed to be the loudest.

I do not claim to understand things to which I do not apply myself.  Nor do I presume to tell a brain surgeon how to perform brain surgery.  Nor do I claim to have all the answers on any particular subject.  Far from it.

However, what I do know is that people who profess something with their mouths and purport to be experts on a subject, yet are not actually doing anything even close to what they speak of, are hypocrites.

Jesus had a lot to say to people like that.

I’m not going to get much into that here.  But there are a few things that I would like to address.

There are those who read what I have to say and subsequently they get very, very angry.  There are those who, for some reason that is unknown to me, continue following what we are doing for the Kingdom of God and yet continue to get agitated and so they spread lies about us and speak slanderous things about how we are rebellious and dangerous to the Body of Christ today.

There are leaders of church organizations in and around the area in which we live as well as elsewhere who apparently are saying some not-so-nice things about us, and, quite frankly, I have no idea why or who these people even are.

While I do expect persecution, as Jesus did promise it, it has never ceased to amaze me how much hypocrisy and spinelessness has infected the minds and lives of those who profess Christ as Lord and Savior.  The righteous should be bold as lions (Prov. 28:1).  It doesn’t say the righteous will hide behind their pulpits and church titles and spread slander and gossip about people who are doing the works of the Kingdom.

To those of you who fall into that category, I would humbly request that if you really do take issue with anything that we are saying or doing, kindly follow the Biblical model of confrontation as laid out in Matthew 18 and come directly to me.  There is a contact page directly on this site and if you need a link, it can be found here.  I would confront these people on my own, except for the fact that most of them I don’t even know who they are, nor do they know me.

I am happy to speak with anyone who is willing to talk with me.

What I will not do is bow to intimidation, control, manipulation, political power plays, and fear of man.

The ones who persecuted Jesus were those who knew what they should have been doing, and yet were not doing it.  I expect nothing less.

These hypocrites were the most religious looking folks of their day.  They believed God existed.  They believed He was sending His Messiah to redeem the world.  They believed in the supernatural (at least the Pharisees did…the Sadducees did not for the most part).

They had a lot of big temples and looked important and powerful to every outside observer.

And yet, while their intentions may have been good, their actions still denied the God whom they professed with their mouths to serve and represent.  They were clean on the outside but horribly unclean on the inside.

And they certainly were not ‘saved’.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.” – Matthew 23:14

“You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you:
” ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’”
- Matthew 15:7-9

John the Baptist dealt with the same issue.

“John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?  Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.  The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.“- Luke 3:7-9)

Most people today would say Jesus and John weren’t walking in love.

The intensity and devotion of these men to the Kingdom of God was such that compromise was a word that was not in their vocabulary.  They burned with such a fiery conviction that exposed the hypocrisy of all those around them not only by their words, but by their actions.

“Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.” – 1 John 3:18

Jesus did not tolerate the marketing gimmicks and all of the traditions that had so infected the minds of the Jewish people through the teaching of the Pharisees and the Sadduccees.  He explicitly warned His disciples to be on guard against such teaching (Matthew 16:6, Luke 12:1)

So why is it that today we as Christians who are truly following God and His Kingdom so tolerate that which Jesus never did?

Each one of us has had a battle with hypocrisy.  Every day we are faced with situations and circumstances where we know better—we know the good that we should do and yet have failed to do what we should do.  In so doing, we have sinned (James 4:17).

The question is what do we do once we have recognized the error of our ways.

I do to others what I would have them do to me.  That is love.  If I was wrapped up in some tradition or mindset that I had been spoonfed my whole life in church services that did nothing to set me or others free, I would want someone to have the backbone to confront me on it and show me Biblically where I missed it and through the Scriptures and life of Christ, the proper way to go about living the Christian life.

That is why I say the things that I say.  That is why I do the things I do.

I do to others what I would have them do to me.  Love God with your whole being and love others as yourself.  This sums up all the law and the prophets.

That principle removes absolutely every single excuse people use to not heal the sick, preach the Gospel, speak Truth, and demonstrate the Kingdom of God to everyone around you.

“Oh, I only do what I see the Father doing.”

“Oh, I have to be led by the Spirit.”

“Oh, but I’m not called to that.  You’re an evangelist.  I’m an ‘intercessor’.   I’m a worshiper.  I’m a prophetic dancer.  I’m a prophetic artist.”

Yeah?  But are you a Christian?  Are you a believer—by Jesus’ definition (Mark 16:17-18)?

Can you do what Jesus actually said to do?  Or are you inventing ministries to compensate for your own unbelief and lack of obedience to the commands of Christ?

There is nothing wrong with intercession.  There is nothing wrong with worship.  There is nothing wrong with dancing before the Lord.  And there is nothing wrong with embracing creativity and artistically showing things that God has shown us.

However, we don’t need the Spirit of God to dance.  We don’t need the Spirit of God to sing.  We don’t need the Spirit of God to paint.  We don’t even need the Spirit of God to preach on Sunday mornings.

We need the Spirit of God to do the things Jesus said to do.

We need the Spirit of God to demonstrate the power of His Kingdom and of His Love.

Paul was very clear that he came with demonstrations of the Spirit’s power because he wanted the church’s faith to be in the power of God:

“My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.” – 1 Corinthians 2:4-5

If what you are doing is not setting people free–physically, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, and financially–you are preaching a powerless Gospel, which, according to Paul, really is not the Gospel at all…and additionally, Paul had some other not-so-encouraging things to say to those who preached a different Gospel than the one Jesus and the apostles preached:

“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— which is really no gospel at all.  Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!

Am I now trying to win the approval of men, or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ.“
-Galatians 1:6-10

Good intentions never fixed anything.

There are a lot of people who talk a lot about the power of God.  They talk about what God is ‘going to do’.  Or they talk about what God did in the past.  Yet they aren’t seeing results and their congregations are full of sick people.

Most are hearing the Word of God and not doing it—and in this, they deceive themselves (James 1:22).

Most of what comes from the pulpits of a lot of our well-meaning, good-intentioned churches is nothing but a lot of nice sounding theory.

Our God is the great I AM.  The God of right now.

Jesus said to preach THIS message: Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  He said to preach the message and to demonstrate it’s reality by healing the sick, casting out demons, raising the dead (Matthew 10:7-8)…doing the impossible because all things are possible to those who believe.

Change the way you think.  God is here, amongst us, right now.  He is available.  He is waiting to reveal Himself through those who are willing to pay the price and actually believe that He is who He says He is and that we are who He says we are and that we can do what He says we can do.

If you aren’t doing it, you aren’t doing it.

We need to stop majoring on the things the Scriptures minor on and start actually putting action behind our words and demonstrating to this planet that God is real, He is for us, and that He is with us.  We need to stop talking about Jesus and hopping from meeting to meeting week to week and month to month and actually demonstrate the reality of the Kingdom of God.

Everything else is just worthless religion.

If you can’t do these things, instead of just blindly getting angry for the fact that powerlessness has blatantly been confronted, I’d suggest actually seeking God and asking why you aren’t seeing the kinds of results that we should all be seeing as the people of God.  I know we are constantly asking these kinds of questions so as to better re-present Jesus to the world.

If what you’re doing isn’t working, why is it so offensive to consider changing what you’re doing?

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